Knowledge, Skills, and Attitude

Knowledge, Skills & Attitude form a trinity, a triangular unity (I give them each a capital for extra effect). Although we all sort of know what each one means, we are not always so clear about how those three relate to each other. Let me try to give you a clear and compelling way to see what they mean and how they work together.

Knowledge

Knowledge is information conceptually held by some sapient creature that can potentially at least, be put to use.

There is no other kind. And this is somehow shocking. All knowledge is conceptually held, and it is always and exclusively held as knowledge by a sapient creature, and it is always ready to be put to use in some way. How is that so? How can I be so certain? Well, it is, partly at least, a matter of definition.

The traditional definition of knowledge is that it constitutes the holding of justified, true, beliefs. Let’s unpack that.

Belief

A belief is something that can only be held by a believer. And a believer must be capable of holding beliefs as beliefs, and not as a parrot might be able to recite pieces of Shakespeare or a silicon chip might hold the digital code for an algorithm.

We can say of the parrot that it knows how to imitate noises, but we cannot confidently claim that the parrot knowingly and lovingly selected the passages after having reflected on the beauties and profundities of the playwright.

I don’t think I need waste time arguing that, surely. We have defined homo sapiens as a species distinguished by ‘sapience’, that refers to the activity of ‘knowing’. Such an honorific title is perhaps a little arrogant. There are many creatures with a measure of sapience, the parrot being a case in point, nor is it at all clear when sapience becomes properly distinguishable from sentience, whereby a creature senses something and reacts to that sensation in what we might call a hard-wired way. But enough of that for now.

From another line of attack, we can say that a belief held in a book, is not held by that book as a belief. It is held by that book as information. Books do not believe things. The author of the book may have believed what they wrote at the moment of writing the book or they may have been describing someone else’s purported belief. But what a reader reads in a book, even if it was written down as a belief has, by the time it is read become pure information.

It only becomes knowledge again when the reader commits themselves to believe what the book holds as information. To do this they also have to do more than just commit to it. They demand of themselves that they understand what is written so as to be able to commit to it on the basis of good reasons.

We shall get to those in a minute. The point to be rubbed in here is that no one else can do the believing for them. They may, as a child, have been brought up to believe certain things. And no doubt they will continue to do so, happily no doubt, until such time as they learn to think differently. But even though they may have had those beliefs ‘forced’ upon their it is still ‘she’ who does the believing.

To move the example from the third person to the first person you could see a me, or indeed any person, as a creature with a body capable of holding beliefs. Of course, such a me or such a person is also much more, but their sapience is at least a necessary ingredient of being a me, even if it is not a sufficient one. And it is interesting to observe that whenever a person uses the word ‘me’ when talking or writing, it is more often than not about their commitments to certain beliefs they talk or write about.

True belief

Having dealt with the ‘belief’ bit, we now get to the reasons for committing to a belief and hold it as the truth. So, what about that ‘true’ bit? Well, here things become a little more complicated. It might help to divide the issue into two parts.

In the strict definition, knowledge must be consistent with (that is aesthetically harmonized with so that it forms a logical whole) our other beliefs as well as being an accurate reflection of the behaviour of the world.

To be true, a belief must be rationally consistent and compatible with our other beliefs. Or, if it is not then one of the two (the new belief or my system of ready beliefs) is wrong and this needs to be sorted out.

All those beliefs taken together as a working system should form an accurate reflection of what is happening in the world ‘out there’ such that my beliefs can be empirically tested or at least observationally confirmed.

You can see with this last demand how things become a bit iffy at this stage. To observe something happening does not always mean that you understand what you think you have observed.

And it goes from bad to worse. The less strict definition acknowledges that many people use the word knowledge to refer to beliefs that they in turn believe to be consistent with their other beliefs and believe to be an accurate reflection of reality.

But as the grounds of those beliefs are not always strong, much of what we call knowledge does not obey the strict definition and comes to us in watered down versions. These weaker beliefs are then sometimes compensated for by the intensity with which we hold and proclaim them.

Having said that, it is not always easy to keep the stricter definition separate from the looser definition. Even the strictest scientists have to speculate and assume things, have to take risks regarding what they believe they know. If they knew everything, the knowledge adventure would be over. It isn’t. We know practically nothing. We muddle along, all of us, necessarily.

The difference between the committed scholar or scientist and the rest of us, is that they will maintain the administration of their beliefs very carefully regarding what they accept as knowledge and what they accept conditionally as an assumption, a hypothesis, or as a speculative possibility.

Whatever the case, for something to count as knowing something, we at least have to believe that what we hold to be knowledge is both an accurate model of reality and true in the sense that it is consistent with our other beliefs and that the claim forms a legitimate move in the grammar of language or the game rules of mathematics. In the best cases we can demonstrate that everything fits harmoniously together. Those moments are moments of true beauty.

Justified belief

That we have to at least believe that our knowledge is true, is demonstrated by the opposite. Imagine claiming something to be true knowledge when you know that it is false.

People who hold this are lying. No one can knowingly think that a false belief constitutes true knowledge. You can have knowledge of the fact that some belief is false; that would count as true knowledge about that false belief. But that is something quite different.

The bit about knowledge being a justified true belief is an attempt to stop people naively claiming beliefs that they merely accept on some baseless authority to be true. We want good reasons for people to accept something as knowledge. The possibility of the looser definition of knowledge makes clear why that is useful.

So, there we have it. The activity of knowing to count as that activity must satisfy the criteria of holding beliefs that are true and whose truth can be justified. Once one can claim that one has satisfied those criteria with regard to conceptual consistency and the relationship of that conceptual consistency with the behaviour of the world out there one can claim to hold knowledge.

Information versus knowledge

Now, most people stop there. They now think that they have sufficiently defined what knowledge is. But for me that is not quite enough.

Knowledge is held in the form of concepts coded in intentional movements (movements of the body whereby you demonstrate that you know what you are doing), gestures, drawings, words, and numbers (that you know what they should express and communicate) and the way they relate to each other through the inferences they allow.

That last bit is very important. Before knowledge is made ready for reasoning, for making inferences, it should be called information. Information is all around. Knowledge is more than information; it is information judged accurate and true and therefore worthy of belief and made ready for use in reasoning.

We have to believe that it is true for it to be useful, we have to be able to justify why we believe it to be true, but knowledge cannot just be the holding of a belief. Knowledge has to be about understanding at least some of the implications of our beliefs so as to make knowledge active and useful in reasoning to prepare deliberate and intentional action. 

Knowledge is holding a belief and being able to explore its implications for action. Without that last bit, knowledge is impotent, it cannot even help us to understand the world. Understanding is no passive activity. It is as athletic as running is. It requires hard work. Knowledge then, is to hold beliefs and to be able to reason with them.

Skills

With the word ‘action’ from the previous paragraph, knowledge moves from knowing that something is the case and knowing some of its implications to knowing how to make use of that knowledge, a kind of second order knowing.

Skills concern our knowledge of how to use knowledge either in discourse, where we can improve our skills in thinking, reasoning, conversing, debating and so forth, or any other kind of practice whereby we implement that which we think we know and act upon it knowingly, such as knowing how to sharpen a chisel, or knowing how to sail a boat, to give feedback and so forth and so forth. So, skill is the skill of knowing how to do something. It is using what we know to do something knowingly.

Attitude

Skills can be effectively used by people who want to do good and equally effectively by people who want to do bad or even by those people who do not really know or care what they bring about through their doings.

To make the difference, we need attitude. An attitude is given shape by norms and values, it gives us a perspective on a situation in which we need to act knowingly in order to act well.

An attitude is formed through the selection and acquisition of values which then tells us what it is right and good and useful to do with our knowledge and how to do it so that the end result will be helpful towards a cause considered good, just, fair, or right (or whatever…) so that the consequences of your actions are for the best. Attitude instils our knowledge and skills with a valued objective or goal allowing us to develop the wisdom to know good means to good ends. Attitude gives knowledge of things and skills a goal, a considered direction.

It is that simple. You could, if you like, also look at it in this way: Knowledge is knowledge of what and knowledge of what that could mean. Skills is know-how, or the knowledge of how to do something, how to apply your knowledge of things knowingly. Attitude is knowing to what purpose or end you should do something, knowing why you should do this rather than that. What, how, why.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.